Panel 1 in today’s strip is brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

A remarkable number of partygoers, including Brinkel himself, apparently failed to understand the “masque” part of masquerade… and how embarrassing, two other heavyset guys showed up not only dressed as the same character, but in the exact same costume as Brinkel. Brinkel and two other schlubs dressing as Pagliacci, the clown in an opera about a comic actor who murders an actress, to a masquerade ball costume party where a comic actor allegedly murders an actress was rumored to be more than a coincidence because subtlety’s funeral was last week and TB was a pallbearer.

17 responses to “Sneers of a Clown”

So if there are three fat guys dressed as Pagliacci at the party and one of them kills Valerie Pond, how does the prosecution establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Butter did the crime. Even if one of his guns was the weapon, given that it’s common knowledge that he has a massive gun collection, barring the presence of his unsmudged fingerprints as the only ones present on the weapon.

It’s Tom Batiuk’s Wide World Of Tropes. Things are sort of “happening” now, although I’ll be damned if I know what the hell this is building toward. I still can’t see any way it isn’t going to be the monkey, as it just seems so Batiukian to me.

Yeah. Here’s where being a truculent pea-brain is going to mess up Brinkel’s life. He’s too stupid to insist that people check with him before deciding what costume they can wear for the “I’m stupid so I don’t actually know what masquerade means” ball so his idiocy looks like plausible deniability to other imbeciles.

So, being “more than coincidence” implies that the real murderer planned the murder beforehand, somehow found out that Butters would be dressed as Pagliacci, donned the same costume, and somehow convinced another guest to also dress as Pagliacci? Assuming that we’re actually seeing the documentary footage here, how did we get film from the actual party?

And WHY was there film of this dumb party anyway? If it’s supposed to be some kind of hush hush studio bacchanal that might do a single thing to tarnish a studio’s squeaky clean public image, no way would there be a record of it. (See the story of Patricia Douglas’s horrible uphill battle to bring charges when she was raped at an MGM party in 1932. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/04/mgm200304) And if it was a private affair, then they’d be equally unlikely to bother setting up bulky camera equipment to document their own likely misdeeds. What are we supposed to be seeing here?

GAH, I hate this storyline, even though it lets me be that “well ACTUALLY” guy. Wait, nobody likes that guy. I hate this storyline. The chimp did it.

Just an observation that in TB’s world, only his characters are smart enough to solve a century old crime with the same information that was available to police and prosecutors 100 years ago. The jealous monkey did it…moving on…